V. I. Lenin

Speech Delivered at the

Third All-Russia  Trade Union Congress

Delivered:April 7, 1920First Published:Bulletin of the Third All-Russia Trade Union CongressNo. 2, April 8, 1920; Published according toThird All-Russia Trade Union Congress, Verbatim Report,1921, verified with the text of theBulletinSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 502-515Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

(Prolonged,stormy
    applause. Ovation.) Comrades, permit me to begin by conveying
    greetings from the Council of People’s Commissars to the
    Third All-Russia Congress. (Applause.) Comrades, Soviet
    power is now passing through a phase of outstanding importance,
    which in many respects confronts us with the highly complex and
    interesting tasks that belong to a period of change. And it is the
    specific nature of the period that provides the trade unions with
    special tasks and special responsibilities in the work of building
    socialism.

That is why I should now like to dwell not so much on certain
    decisions of the Party Congress which has just ended (on this
    subject you will receive a more detailed report) as on those
    changes in the conditions of Soviet policy which link up all the
    tasks of socialist construction and the activities of the trade
    unions. The chief feature of the present phase is the transition
    from war tasks, which have hitherto absorbed all the attention and
    effort of the Soviet government, to tasks of peaceful economic
    development. And it should be mentioned right away that this is
    not the first time that the Soviet government and the Soviet
    Republic are passing through such a phase. We are reverting to
    this question once more—this is the second time since the
    dictatorship of the proletariat was established that history has
    brought the work of peaceful construction into the
    foreground.

The first time was at the beginning of 1918, when, after the
    brief but very impetuous offensive of German imperialism, at a
    time when the old capitalist army had completely  collapsed and
    when we had no army of our own and could not create one rapidly,
    the German imperialist predators forced the Peace of Brest-Litovsk
    upon us. It seemed as if war tasks had receded into the
    background, owing to the weakness of the available forces of the
    Soviet government. It seemed as if we could proceed to the work of
    peaceful construction. I had occasion to make a report to the
    All-Russia Central Executive Committee at that time, too. That was
    on April 29, 1918, nearly two years ago. The Central Committee
    adopted a number of theses based on my report and had them
    published. I remind you of this because even at that time the
    theses enumerated a number of questions—on labour discipline
    and so forth—which are included in the agenda of this
    Congress. There is a similarity between that time and the
    present. I assure you that our attention is again being
    concentrated on the disputes and differences which were aired in
    the trade union movement two years ago. It would be a profound
    mistake to assert that the decisions of the Ninth Congress of the
    Russian Communist Party arose out of the present disputes. Such an
    assertion would only tend to distort the true picture of
    events. And, therefore, in order to understand the true nature of
    the question and to set about its solution in a proper way, it
    would be useful to compare and give some thought to conditions as
    they were at the beginning of 1918 and as they are today.

At that time, during the brief suspension of the war against
    German imperialism, the tasks of peace-time development assumed
    prominence. It looked as if we might enjoy a long period of
    peaceful constructive work. Civil war had not yet begun. Krasnov
    had, with German aid, only just appeared on the Don. There were no
    hostilities in the Urals and in the North. The Soviet Republic
    included a vast territory—all except what it had been
    deprived of by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Conditions were such
    that we might count upon a long period of peaceful work. And,
    under these conditions, the primary question taken up by the
    Communist Party and stressed in a number of resolutions
    (particularly that of April 29, 1918) was the need for widespread
    propaganda of, and greater insistence on, labour discipline.

Dictatorial powers and one-man management are not contradictory
    to socialist democracy. This must now be borne in mind, if the
    decisions adopted by the recent Party Congress and the general
    tasks that confront us are to be understood. And this is not an
    answer to questions that have only just arisen; it has its deep
    roots in the very conditions of the period in which we live. Let
    anyone who doubts this compare the situation with what it was two
    years ago, and he will understand that the present phase demands
    that all attention be devoted to labour discipline, to the labour
    armies, although two years ago there was no mention of labour
    armies. Only by comparing the issue as it stands today with the
    way it stood then, can we draw a proper conclusion, ignoring minor
    details and singling out what is general and fundamental. The
    whole attention of the Communist Party and the Soviet government
    is centred on peaceful economic development, on problems of the
    dictatorship and of one-man management. Not only the experience we
    have had in the stubborn civil war of the past two years leads us
    to such a solution of these problems.

When we tackled them for the first time in 1918, there was no
    civil war and no experience to speak of.

It was, therefore, not only the experience of the Red Army and
    of the victorious Civil War, but something more profound,
    something bound up with the tasks of the dictatorship of the
    working class in general, that has induced us now, as it did two
    years ago, to concentrate all our attention on labour discipline
    as the crucial factor in the economic development of socialism,
    and as the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat as we
    understand it. Since capitalism was overthrown, every day of our
    revolution has taken us further and further away from the idea
    about which the old internationalists, who were thoroughly
    petty-bourgeois, made so much ado; they believed that the decision
    of a majority in the democratic institutions of bourgeois
    parliamentarism—with private property in land, the means of
    production and capital still retained—could settle the
    issue, when as a matter of fact it can be decided only by a bitter
    class struggle. The significance of the dictatorship of the
    proletariat in actual practice unfolded before us when, after the
    conquest of power, we set about putting it into practice and saw
    that the struggle between classes had not ceased with this, that
    the victory over the capitalists and landowners had not destroyed
    these classes, that it had only smashed them, but had not
    completely destroyed them; suffice it to mention the international
    ties of capital, which are of much longer standing and more solid
    than the ties of the working class are as yet.

On an international scale, capital is still stronger, both from
    the military and the economic standpoint, than Soviet power and
    the Soviet system. That is the fundamental premise from which we
    must proceed, and we must never forget it. Forms of the struggle
    against capital change—at one time they acquire an open
    international character, at another they are centred in one
    country. The forms change, but the struggle goes on whether it be
    in the military, the economic, or some other sphere of the social
    system; and our revolution confirms the basic law of the class
    struggle The greater the cohesion achieved by the proletariat in
    over throwing the bourgeois classes, the more it learns. The
    revolution develops in the course of the struggle itself. And the
    struggle does not cease with the overthrow of the
    capitalists. Only after the defeat of the capitalists has been
    consolidated in one country does it acquire practical significance
    for the whole world. At the beginning of the October Revolution
    the capitalists regarded our revolution as a freak—any queer
    thing may happen in those distant parts, they thought.

For the dictatorship of the proletariat to acquire world
    significance, it had to be consolidated in practice in some one
    country. Only then did the capitalists—not only the Russian
    capitalists, who at once rushed to seek the aid of other
    capitalists, but the capitalists of all other
    countries—become convinced that this matter was acquiring
    international significance. Only then did the resistance of the
    capitalists on a world scale attain the force it did. Only then
    did civil war develop in Russia and all the victorious countries
    do their utmost to assist the Russian capitalists and landowners
    in the Civil War.

The class struggle in Russia had taken full shape by 1900,
    whereas the socialist revolution became victorious in 1917. Not
    only did the resistance of the overthrown class continue to
    develop after its overthrow, but it acquired a new source of
    strength in the relations between the proletariat and the
    peasantry. This is known to anybody who has made any study of
    Marxism, who has based socialism on the international movement of
    the working class, as its only scientific foundation. Everyone
    knows that Marxism gives the theoretical reason for the abolition
    of classes. What does this mean? For the victory of socialism it
    is not enough to overthrow the capitalists; the difference between
    the proletariat and the peasantry must be abolished. The position
    of the peasantry is this—on the one hand, it is a class of
    working people, who for decades and centuries were oppressed by
    the landowners and capitalists, and it will therefore be a long
    time before they can forget that the workers alone liberated them
    from this oppression. This question could be discussed for
    decades; reams of paper have been filled on the subject, and many
    factional groups have taken shape around it. But we now see that
    these differences have paled before reality. As working people,
    the peasants will not forget for many years to come that it was
    the workers alone who liberated them from the landowners. That
    cannot be contested; but they remain property-owners in a
    commodity-producing economy. Every case of a sale of grain on the
    open market, of speculation and profiteering is the restoration of
    a commodity-producing economy, and hence of capitalism. By
    overthrowing the capitalists we liberated the peasantry, a class
    which in old Russia undoubtedly comprised the majority of the
    population. The peasants have remained property-owners in their
    form of production, and they are continuing to develop new
    capitalist relations after the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. These
    are the basic features of our economic position. Hence the
    absurdity of the talk we hear from those who do not understand the
    state of affairs. The talk of equality, liberty and democracy
    under present conditions is nonsense. We are waging a class
    struggle, and our aim is to abolish classes. As long as workers
    and peasants remain, socialism has not been achieved. And, in
    practice, we find an irreconcilable struggle going on
    everywhere. We must think about how and under what conditions the
    proletariat, wielding so powerful an apparatus of coercion as the
    state, can attract the peasant as a working man and overcome his
    resistance as a property-owner, or render it harmless.

Here the class struggle is continuing, and this throws new
    light on the significance of the dictatorship of the
    proletariat. It appears before us not only, and not even largely,
    as the employment of the coercive means of the state apparatus for
    the suppression of the resistance of the exploiters. It is, of
    course, right to say that we have done a lot by taking this as the
    basis, but we also have another method, in which the proletariat
    plays the part of an organiser, of one who has been through the
    school of labour and the training and discipline of the capitalist
    factory. We must organise economic life on a new and more perfect
    basis, counting on and utilising all the achievements of
    capitalism. Without this we shall never be able to build socialism
    and communism. This is much more difficult than the war tasks: In
    many respects the war tasks are easier to accomplish. They can be
    accomplished by enthusiasm, energy and self-sacrifice. It was
    easier for the peasant to fight his inveterate enemy, the
    landowner, and more within his understanding. He did not have to
    understand the connection between the power of the workers and the
    necessity to put down freedom of trade. It was easier to beat the
    Russian whiteguards, the landowners and capitalists, and their
    henchmen, the Mensheviks. This victory will cost us more, both in
    time and effort.

You cannot win in economic matters in the same way as in a
    war. Freedom of trade cannot be defeated by enthusiasm and
    self-sacrifice. Here, prolonged work is required; the ground has
    to be won inch by inch; the organising forces of the proletariat
    are required. Victory may be achieved only it the proletariat
    wields its dictatorship as a great, organised and organising
    force, a force of moral influence on all the working people,
    including the non-proletarian working masses. Now that we have
    been successful—and will continue to be equally
    successful—in carrying out the first and simplest task, the
    suppression of the exploiters who directly attempt to sweep away
    Soviet power, a second and more complex task arises, which is to
    organise the forces of the proletariat, to learn to be good
    organisers. Labour must be organised in a new way; new ways of
    stimulating people to work and to observe labour discipline must
    be devised. Even capitalism took decades to accomplish this. All
    too often the worst mistakes are made in this field. Many of our
    opponents show a complete failure to understand this
    question. They said we were utopians when we maintained that power
    could be seized. On the other hand, they expect us to complete the
    organisation of labour in a few months and to show results that
    require several years to produce. That is absurd. Given the
    political conditions, power can be retained by the sheer
    enthusiasm of the workers, perhaps even in the face of the whole
    world. That we have proved. But the creation of new forms of
    social discipline requires decades. Even capitalism required many
    decades to transform the old system of organisation. From the
    theoretical standpoint it is sheer nonsense to expect that we can
    reconstruct the organisation of labour in short order, and to
    instil this idea into the minds of the, workers and peasants.

And not only is it nonsense, it is extremely harmful, because
    it prevents the workers from clearly understanding the difference
    between the new tasks and the old. The new task is to organise
    industry, and first of all our own forces—and as far as
    organisation is concerned, we are weak, weaker than any of the
    advanced nations. The ability to do this is developed by
    large-scale machine industry, and it has never, in all history,
    had any other material basis than the productive labour of
    millions employing large-scale machine industry in accordance with
    a previously established plan. And here the interests of the
    proletariat and the peasantry do not coincide. A difficult period
    of struggle begins—a struggle against the peasantry. We
    must, however, make it clear to the peasants that they have no
    other course; they must either march with the workers, they must
    help the proletariat, or again succumb to the rule of the
    landowners. There is no middle course; the Mensheviks have a
    middle course, but it is a thoroughly rotten one and is failing
    everywhere, including Germany. The peasant masses cannot get an
    understanding of this by theory or by observing the Second and
    Third Internationals. The peasant masses—comprising tens of
    millions of people—can get an understanding of this only
    from their own experience, from their daily practical life. The
    peasants could understand the victory over Kolchak and
    Denikin. They were able to compare in practice Kolchak and Denikin
    with the dictatorship of the working class which the Mensheviks
    and Socialist-Revolutionaries had tried very hard and are still
    trying to scare the peasants with. But actually the peasants could
    never study theory, and cannot now. The peasant masses see that
    the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries are all lying; and
    they see the struggle we are waging against profiteering. It must
    be confessed that the Mensheviks too have made some progress in
    propaganda, having learned something from our political
    departments in the army. The peasants saw a banner on which was
    inscribed, not dictatorship of the proletariat, but Constituent
    Assembly, the power of the people; they did not see the word
    “dictatorship”, they did not even understand the
    word. But experience has taught them that Soviet government is
    better.

And we are now faced with a second task, that of bringing moral
    influence to bear on the peasantry. Coercive methods towards the
    peasantry will help us little. It is the economic differentiation
    of the peasantry that is involved here. Since the overthrow of the
    capitalists, the struggle has drawn the workers close together;
    they have been cemented by two years of civil war. The peasantry,
    on the other hand, is splitting up more and more. The peasants
    cannot forget the landowners and capitalists; they remember
    them. Nevertheless, the peasantry of today are disunited; the
    interests of one section clash with those of another. The
    peasantry are not united. For one thing, not every peasant has
    food surpluses. There is no such equality. It is nonsense to say
    there is. To divide the peasantry and win over the non-kulak
    elements will require a lot of time. It will involve a long
    struggle, in which we shall employ all our forces, every means at
    our disposal. But force alone cannot ensure victory; moral means
    must be employed too. And from this follow all the questions of
    dictatorial power and individual authority which to many, or to
    some at any rate, it may be safely said, appear to have arisen
    only out of our recent disputes. But that is a mistake. Compare
    the situation with that of 1918. There were no disputes then.

When, after the peace with Germany, the question arose as to
    what should be the basis of power, we Communists replied—it
    must he made clear that democracy under the Soviet system does not
    contradict dictatorship. This was not to the liking of many
    leaders of the old International. Even Kautsky cursed me.

The peasants are half labourers and half property-owners, and
    in order to win them over to us there must be unity of will, all
    must act in unison on every practical issue. Unity of will must
    not be a catchword, a symbol. We demand it in practice. This is
    how unity of will was expressed during the war—anybody who
    placed his own interests (or the interests of his village or
    group) above the common interests, was branded as a self-seeker
    and was shot; this was justified by the moral consciousness of the
    working class that it must achieve victory. We spoke about these
    shootings openly; we said that we made no secret of coercion,
    because we realised that we could not emerge from the old society
    without resorting to compulsion as far as the backward section of
    the proletariat was concerned. That is the way unity of will was
    expressed, and it was maintained in practice by punishing every
    deserter; in every battle and every campaign it was maintained by
    the Communists marching in the forefront and setting an
    example. The present task is to try to apply this unity of will to
    industry and agriculture. We have a territory stretching thousands
    of versts and huge numbers of factories. You must realise,
    therefore, that we cannot achieve our purpose by force alone; you
    must realise what a colossal task confronts us and what unity of
    will means today. It is not only a slogan. It must be given
    thought, careful thought. It is a slogan that entails prolonged,
    day-to-day effort. Take 1918, when there were no such disputes;
    even then I pointed to the necessity for individual authority, to
    the need to recognise the dictatorial authority of individuals in
    order to carry out the Soviet idea. All talk about equality of
    rights is nonsense. We are not waging the class struggle on the
    basis of equality of rights, nor can we if the proletariat is to
    prevail. Prevail it can, because we have hundreds of thousands of
    disciplined people expressing a single will; and it can prevail
    over the peasantry, which have been dispersed economically, and
    which have no common basis such as welds together the proletariat
    in the factories and the cities. The peasants are economically
    disunited. They are partly property-owners and partly
    labourers. Property drags them towards capitalism: “The more
    profitably I sell, the better.
    If they’re starving, I’ll sell at a higher
    price.” But, as a working man, the peasant knows that he
    suffered oppression at the hands of the landowner, from which he
    was liberated by the worker. Here we have a conflict of two souls,
    resulting from the economic status of the peasantry. These two
    souls must be separated one from the other. And we shall win only
    when we pursue a firm policy. All working people will always be
    working people to us; but as for the peasant proprietors, we have
    to fight them. Not only are they always at each other’s
    throats, but they are ignorant into the bargain. The gentlemen at
    the League of Nations, thank God, are not ignorant; they are
    probably better educated than our Mensheviks and
    Socialist-Revolutionaries. But what do we find? Japan glorifies
    the League of Nations, yet tries to trip up America, and so
    on.

They are all at loggerheads, whereas we are united. And that is
    why workers in all countries are joining us. Since we have been
    able to defeat such enlightened gentlemen as the directors of
    international policy, who have so much experience, so much wealth,
    and a hundred guns and battleships for every one of ours, it is
    absurd to think that we cannot solve the peasant problem. It is
    discipline, loyalty, and united will that will win here. The will
    of tens and hundreds of thousands of people can be expressed by
    one person. This composite will is achieved in the Soviet way. In
    no other country have there been so many congresses of peasants
    and workers as in ours. That is the way we develop an enlightened
    attitude. What the Soviet Constitution gives us no other state has
    been able to give in two hundred years. (Applause.) To
    take only the number of congresses—no other state has
    summoned so many in a century of democracy. In this way we arrive
    at common decisions and mould a common will.

This is the broad way in which our Soviet Constitution, our
    Soviet form of government are to he understood. Its effect is that
    the decisions of the Soviet government have power of authority
    without parallel in the world, the power of the workers and
    peasants. But that is not enough for us. We are materialists, and
    you cannot satisfy us with power of authority, so please take the
    trouble to put it into effect. And here we find the old bourgeois
    instinct gaining the upper  hand, and we must frankly admit that
    it is stronger than we are. The old petty-bourgeois habit of
    conducting enterprises on individual lines and trying to
    strengthen freedom of trade is stronger than we are.

The trade unions arose out of capitalism as a means developing
      the new class. Class is a concept which is evolved in struggle
      and development. There is no wall dividing one class from
      another. The workers and peasants are not separated by a Chinese
      Wall. How did man learn to form associations? First through the
      guild, and then according to different trades. Having become a
      class, the proletariat grew so strong that it took over the
      whole state machine, proclaimed war on the whole world and
      emerged victorious. The guilds and craft unions have now become
      backward institutions. Time was when the proletarians, under
      capitalism amalgamated along the lines of guild and craft. This
      was progressive at that time because the proletariat could not
      have amalgamated in any other way. It is absurd to say that the
      proletariat could have amalgamated to form a class at once. Such
      amalgamation requires decades. Marx, more than anybody, fought
      such sectarian and short-sighted views. The class grows under
      capitalist conditions, and when the suitable moment for
      revolution arrives, it takes state power into its own hands. And
      then all the guilds and craft unions become obsolete, they play
      a backward role, they are retrograde, not because they are run
      by bad people, but because bad people and enemies of communism
      find in them fertile soil for their propaganda. We are
      surrounded by the petty bourgeoisie who are reviving freedom of
      trade and capitalism. Karl Marx fought vigorously against the
      old utopian socialism and advocated the scientific view, which
      shows that the class struggle fosters the growth of the class,
      and the class must be helped to mature. Marx also fought the
      working class leaders who went astray. In the Federal Council,
      in 1872, a vote of censure was passed on Marx for saying that
      the British leaders had been bribed by the bourgeoisie. Of
      course, Marx did not mean this in the sense that certain people
      were traitors. That is nonsense. He spoke about a bloc of a
      certain section of the workers with the bourgeoisie. The
      bourgeoisie supports this section of the workers directly and
      indirectly. That is the way in which it bribes them.

As far as getting its representatives elected to parliament
    is concerned, the British bourgeoisie has worked miracles, and
    excels all others. Marx and Engels exposed the bourgeoisie over a
    period of forty years, from 1852 to 1892, and the bourgeoisie acts
    in the same way in all countries. The fact that throughout the
    world trade unions have passed from the role of slaves to the role
    of builders marks a turning-point. We have existed for two years
    and what do we see? We see today that the working class has
    suffered most from hunger. In 1918 and 1919 the country’s
    industrial workers received only seven poods of bread each,
    whereas the peasants of the grain-producing gubernias each had
    seventeen poods. Under the tsar the peasant used to get sixteen
    poods of bread at the best, whereas under our rule he gets
    seventeen poods. There is statistical evidence of this. The
    proletariat has been hungry for two years but this hunger has
    shown that the worker is capable of sacrificing not only his craft
    interests, but even his life. The proletariat was able to stand
    famine for two years because it had the moral support of all the
    labouring folk, and it bore these sacrifices for the sake of the
    victory of the workers’ and peasants’ government. It
    is true that the division of workers according to trade continues,
    and that many of these trades were necessary to the capitalist but
    are not necessary to us. And we know that the workers in these
    trades are suffering more severely from hunger than others. And it
    cannot be otherwise. Capitalism has been smashed, but socialism
    has not yet been built; and it will take a long time to
    build. Here we come up against all sorts of misunderstandings,
    which are not fortuitous, but are the result of the difference in
    the historical role of the trade unions as an instrument of craft
    amalgamation under capitalism and the trade unions as an
    instrument of the class amalgamation of the workers after they
    have taken over the state power. The workers are prepared to make
    any sacrifice; they create the discipline which compels people to
    say and feel, perhaps vaguely, that class interests are higher
    than craft interests. Workers who are incapable of making such
    sacrifices we regard as self-seekers, and we drive them out of the
    proletarian fold.

Such was the fundamental question of labour discipline, of
    one-man management in a general sense, as discussed by the Party
    Congress. That is the gist of the decisions of the Party Congress,
    which you are all familiar with and which will be spoken of in
    greater detail in special reports. Their meaning is that the
    working class has grown and matured; it has taken over the power
    and is fighting the whole bourgeois world; and this struggle is
    becoming more and more difficult. It was easier to fight in the
    war. What is now required is organisation and moral
    education. Numerically the proletariat in Russia is at present not
    very strong. Its ranks have grown thinner during the war and our
    very victories have made it harder for us to govern the
    country. Both the trade unionists and the masses of the workers
    must realise this. When we talk about dictatorship, it is not the
    whim of centralists. The regions we have won have greatly enlarged
    the territory of Soviet Russia. We have won Siberia, the Don and
    the Kuban areas. There the percentage of proletarians is very
    small, smaller than it is here. We must go straight to the worker
    and tell him frankly that conditions of work have grown more
    complicated. We need more discipline, more individual authority
    and more dictatorship. Without that, we cannot even dream of a
    bigger victory. We have an organised army of three million
    members. The 600,000 Communists, the members of the Party, must
    act as its vanguard.

But it must be realised that we have no other army with which
    to gain a victory than the 600,000 Communists and the three
    million trade union members. The acquisition of territories with a
    peasant-kulak population demands a new exertion of proletarian
    effort. We are faced with a new ratio of proletarian to
    non-proletarian masses, of their social and class
    interests. Nothing can be done here by force alone, organisation
    and moral authority are all that is needed. Hence our absolute
    conviction, which was expressed by our Party Congress and which I
    deem it my duty to uphold. Our chief slogan is—let us have
    more one-man management, let get closer to one-man management, let
    us have more labour discipline, let us pull ourselves together and
    work with military determination, staunchness and loyalty,
    brushing aside all group and craft interests, sacrificing all
    private interests. We cannot succeed otherwise. But if we carry
    out this decision of the Party, carry it out to a man among the
    three million workers, and then among the tens of millions of
    peasants, who will feel the moral authority and strength of the
    people who have sacrificed themselves for the victory of
    socialism, we shall be absolutely and completely
    invincible. (Stormy applause.)

[1]TheThird All-Russia Trade Union Congresswas held in
    Moscow April 6-13, 1920, in the House of Trade Unions. It was
    attended by nearly 1,600 delegates, who represented over 4 million
    trade union members. The Bolsheviks constituted a majority at the
    Congress 1,180 delegates were Bolsheviks and their supporters, 57
    were Mensheviks, and 69 represented other parties.

The Congress based its work on the programme of
    economic development mapped out by the Ninth Party Congress. The
    agenda included the following items: report on the activities of
    the All-Russia Central Council of Trade Unions, report on the
    activities of the People’s Commissariat of Labour, the tasks
    of the trade unions, organisational question, tariff policy, the
    supply of goods for workers, the role of the trade unions in the
    national economy, the international trade union movement, cultural
    and educational activities.

At the second plenary meeting of the Congress
    on April 7 Lenin delivered a speech in the name of the Council of
    People’s Commissars. He was greeted with an ovation and the
    audience sang theInternationale.He defined the tasks of
    the Soviet Republic in peace time and drew attention to the work
    of the trade unions in economic development. After Lenin’s
    speech the Congress adopted a decision to issue an appeal to the
    workers and to all working people generally calling upon them to
    combat economic chaos by their joint efforts, to introduce strict
    discipline immediately in all trade union organisations and to
    intensify the work of drawing the masses in the building of
    communism through the medium of the trade unions and under the
    guidance of the Communist Party.

The Third All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions
    fully approved of the decisions of the Ninth Congress of the
    R.C.P.(B.) in the sphere of economic development. The Congress
    condemned the Mensheviks who advocated the independence of the
    trade unions and attempted to oppose them to the Communist
    Party.